Background

Research

Dr. Valafar's research activities fall into two broad categories of research: Computational
Medicine and Computational Biology. The computational medicine tier of his research
is focused on development of computational modeling of human response to different
medical treatments or methods of rehabilitation. Dr. Valafar's group has demonstrated
a success in relation to administration of Hydroxyurea for alleviation of symptoms
associated with Sickle Cell Anemia. The second tier of his research focuses on the
problem of protein folding. The general community of researchers focus on two disjoint
and orthogonal approaches to protein structure determination: purely experimental
and purely computational approaches. Each of these two approaches possess advantages
and disadvantages that results in their continued research and developments and hinders
their practical utility. Dr. Valafar's current research (funded by NIH and NSF) is
focused on exploration of hybrid approaches that combines minimum experimental data
with novel computational approaches. This hybrid approach has been shown to combine
the advantages of each contributing components while mitigating their detriments.